The present invention relates to circuits used in semiconductor memory devices, particularly to an internal voltage converter which can remove an instability of the voltage and an excessive amount of stand-by current since the number of the operating internal voltage converting stages is different according to an amount of required current, that is, a large amount of current such as the case of a starting power supply or a small amount of current such as the case of a stand-by power supply.
As semiconductor devices have a tendency to high density, the size of various transistors used in the circuit becomes more and more reduced. According to the reduction tendency of the transistor size, there occurred disadvantages that the reliability of the transistor for the conventional power supply voltage is degraded and the power consumption of integrated circuits increases. Thus, the internal voltage converter as shown in FIG. 1 is included in the integrated circuit to improve such problems, but its power consumption is considerably large and it becomes the cause to degrade the stability of internal voltage.